References on Chilly Climate for Women Faculty in Academe

Jennifer Freyd, Psychology, University of Oregon
JQ Johnson, Library, University of Oregon

Disclaimer

This page has not been as actively maintained or updated as it might since it was initially written over 10 years ago. Please check other sources for more current information.

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Karyn Lewis, University of Oregon, and
Professor Anne MacLachlan, University of California, Berkeley, for
additional references added January 2008.

2013 Nature Article

“At Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, microbiologist Jo Handelsman is one of many researchers who think that gender discrimination continues to be a significant part of the problem. In a much-talked-about experiment last year6, her team showed that science faculty members of both sexes exhibit unconscious biases against women. Handelsman's group asked 127 professors of biology, chemistry and physics at 6 US universities to evaluate the CVs of two fictitious college students for a job as a laboratory manager. The professors said they would offer the student named Jennifer US$3,730 less per year than the one named John, even though the CVs were identical. The scientists also reported a greater willingness to mentor John than Jennifer. “If you extrapolate that to all the interactions that faculty have with students, it becomes very frightening,” says Handelsman.”

Introduction

Sandler and Hall (1986) write:

In one study, first done in 1968 and then replicated in
1983, college students were asked to rate identical articles to
specific criteria. The authors' names attached to the articles were
clearly male or female, but were reversed for each group of raters:
what one group thought had been written by a male, the second group
thought had been written by a female, and vice versa. Articles
supposedly written by women were consistently ranked lower than
when the very same articles were thought to have been written by a
male. In a similar study, department chairs were asked to make
hypothetical hiring decisions and to assign faculty rank on the
basis of vitae. For vitae with male names, chairs recommended the
rank of associate professor; however, the identical vita with a
female name merited only the rank of assistant professor. These and
many other studies show that in academe as in other settings the
same professional accomplishments are seen as superior in quality
and worthy of higher rewards when attributed to men than when they
are attributed to women.

Bias and discrimination are still with us, as shown in a wide
variety of studies of women in academe. A quotation from
Academe Today (22 May 1997):

A glance at today's issue of "Nature": Swedish study
finds sexism in peer review
Why do few women hold high academic positions in biomedicine?
Among the many theories is the view that women are less productive
than men. But Christine Wenneras and Agnes Wold, two researchers at
Sweden's Goteborg University, found that the peer-review system was
to blame. The researchers examined the peer-review system of the
Swedish Medical Research Council and compared the productivity of
male and female scientists with the scores they had received in
applications for postdoctoral fellowships. The reviewers, they
found, had consistently given female applicants lower scores than
equally productive men. In some cases, they found that female
applicants would have had to publish three extra papers in "Nature"
or "Science," or 20 extra papers in less-prestigious journals, to
be ranked the same as male applicants. "If gender discrimination of
the magnitude we have observed is operative in the peer-review
systems of other research councils and grant-awarding
organizations, and in countries other than Sweden," they write,
that could account for the discrepancy.

Gender bias and discrimination against women in academia take
many forms, from overt sexual harassment to the much more
ubiquitous and insidious problem of subtle and unconscious sexism
impacting daily life, work distribution, student evaluations, and
promotion and hiring decisions. This confluence of problems has
been called the problem of the "chilly climate."

One error people make is assuming that gender bias and
discrimination require a conscious sexist ideology or a conscious
attempt to discriminate against women. In fact, however,
psychological science has overwhelmingly demonstrated that sexist
behaviors, gender bias, and discrimination can and do occur without
these conscious beliefs or attempts to discriminate.

A second error people often make is believing that discrimination is "out there"
but not "here" -- that is, that gender bias is in other environments than one's
very own department or university. It is very hard to discern gender bias in
individual cases, while in aggregate analyses that it is operating may be an
unavoidable conclusion.

A third error is the belief that bias, though present, is negligible in effect.
The problem with this is that a large number of nearly negligible effects all
working in the same direction can easily cumulate to very significant aggregate
discrimination.

It is thus important to ask whether the bias occurs, despite
one's own beliefs that it is not occurring or that no one intends
for it to be occurring. Although many systematic studies have
demonstrated the empirical reality of the phenomena underlying the
chilly climate, much of this research remains outside of mainstream
awareness. For instance, although many studies have documented
biases in student evaluations, only rarely do promotion committees
explicitly take this fact into consideration.

This page contains our selected references primarily to
published empirical studies about chilly climate or related
phenomena for women faculty. Our hope is that this resource will be
useful and educative to students, faculty, and administrators.

General Chilly Climate
References

Acker, Sandra & Feuerverger, Grace (1996).
Doing good and feeling bad: the work of women university teachers,
Cambridge Journal of Education, 26(3): 401-422.

Aisenberg,
N., and Harrington, M. (1988). Women of Academe:
Outsiders in the Sacred Grove. Amherst: The
University of Massachusetts Press.

Bagilhole, B. (1993). How to keep a good woman
down: an investigation of the role of institutional factors in the
process of discrimination against women academics, British
Journal of Sociology of Education, 14: 261-74.

Bluestone, H. H., Stokes, A., and Kuba, S.(1996).
Toward an integrated program design: Evaluating the status of
diversity training in a graduate school curriculum.
Professional Psychology: Research and Practice, 27(4).
394-400.

Callister,
R. R. (2006). The impact of gender and department climate on job satisfaction
and intentions to quit for faculty in science and engineering fields. Journal of Technology Transfer, 31,
367-375.

Caplan, P.J. (1994). Lifting a Ton of
Feathers: A Woman's Guide to Surviving the Academic World.
University of Toronto Press.

Hall, R. M. & Sandler, B. R. (1982). The
classroom climate: A chilly one for women? Included in the "Student
Climate Issues Packet," available from the Project on the Status
and Education of Women, Association of American Colleges, 1818 R
St. NW, Washington, D.C. 20009.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1999).
A Study on the Status of Women Faculty in Science at MIT. The
MIT Faculty Newsletter, XI (4), March 1999. On line at http://web.mit.edu/fnl/women/women.html (15 October 2001).

Landau, Susan (1991). Tenure Track, Mommy
Track. Association for Women in Mathematics Newsletter,
May-June 1991. (Also reprinted in shortened form in the Notices
of the American Mathematical Society, September 1991, pp.
703-4.)

Landau, Susan (1994). Universities and the
Two-Body Problem. Computing Research Newsletter, March,
1994, pg. 4. (Also reprinted in the Newsletter of the
Association for Women in Mathematics, March 1994, pp.
12-14.)

Fogg, Piper (2003). The Gap that won't go away: women continue
to lag behind men in pay; the reasons may have little to do with gender bias. Chronicle of Higher Education, 49 (32), April 18, 2003, A12. http://chronicle.com/weekly
/v49/i32/32a01201.htm.

Some Further Analysis

Pay Inequity

Overall across all employment in the United States women earned
71.5% of what men earned as of 1993. This figure while depressing
is up some since figures from 1963 (59.6%), 1973 (56.6%), and 1983
(63.6%). [Source: National Committee on Pay Equity, 1994, presented
in Unger & Crawford, ]

Studies that have looked at pay for men and women holding the
very same jobs also show inequities (e.g. Nieva & Gutek, 1981
[Women and Work: A psychological perspective, Praeger];
Kim and Johnson, 1984 [article in Journal of Social Service
Research, 8, 61-70]).

An article on page 10 in the 5 May 1989 issue of AAAS
Observer (a newsletter that was published by the American
Association for the Advancement of Science -- publishers of
Science magazine) presents salaries of PhD scientists and
engineers by sex and experience, showing that as years of
experience go up the pay gap increases in absolute dollars. Most
importantly, this article presents PhD women's salaries as a
percentage of men's by field in 1987, and shows that women
psychologists earn about 85% of what men psychologists earn (with
the average for women in all fields in science and engineering
earning approximately 80% of what men earn).

This
is consistent with the claim made in Sandler & Hall's 1986 report "The Campus
Climate Revisited: Chilly for Women Faculty, Administrators, and Graduate Students"
[Washington, D.C: Project on the Status and Education of Women, Association
of American Colleges] that "at every rank, in every field, at every type of
institution, women still earn less than their male counterparts." [As their
source, Sandler & Hall cite Academe, 72(2), March-April 1986, page
10.]

Data collected by the American Association of University Professors (Chronicle
of Higher Education, 2003; Fogg, 2003) indicates that, at all academic ranks
and in all types of ranked institutions of higher education, women continue
to earn on average less than men. The gap exists at all levels including entry
level, and has been quite stable at about 10% for more than a decade.

During summer of 2001, AAAS surveyed for the first
time its 70,000 members who work in the area of life sciences (Renuka & Mervis, 2001; Holden, 2001).

Among their findings relevant to gender:

Men earn almost one-third more than women: $94,000 versus $72,000. The difference
is greatest among academic administrators, where the midpoint is $120,000
for men and $75,000 for women; in industry and government, the figures are
$160,000 for men and $125,000 for women. Although gender differences in pay
are notoriously hard to interpret, the report finds evidence that 'women are
paid less for similar work even when type of employer is held constant.' .
. . [B]y a margin of 36% to 10%, women report more often than men that taking
leave for personal or family reasons is disadvantageous to their careers.
(Holden, 2001).

Chander, Renuka and Jeffrey Mervis (12 October
2001). The Bottom Line for U.S. Life Scientists. Science
Magazine 294 (554), p 395.

One of the most compelling recent studies of gender pay gaps is Travis, et al, 2009. Also see the Wiley Press Release about this article. From the abstract:

Results indicate that both regression and simulation methods provided evidence of a sizable pay gap associated with gender, even after controlling for rank, academic field, and years of service. The gap occurs in fields traditionally viewed as female as well as science fields with typically lower female representation.

Tenure & Award Inequity

Have we achieved tenure equity? According to Sandler & Hall
(1986) ["The Campus Climate Revisited: Chilly for Women Faculty,
Administrators, and Graduate Students" Washington, D.C: Project on
the Status and Education of Women, Association of American
Colleges] "the higher the rank, the fewer the women." They report
that between 1972 and 1981, the percentage of tenured male faculty
increased by 17.7 %; the percentage of tenured female faculty
increased by 13.4%." Sandler & Hall (1986) also report that
women have been less likely to receive tenure than men: 47% of
women faculty are tenured, compared to 69 % of the men. [As their
source, Sandler & Hall cite Academe, 72(2),
March-April 1986, page 15.]

2008 Update

Handelsman and Grymes (2008) noted in their editorial ("Looking for a few good women?") published in DNA and Cell Biology [Volume 27, pages 463-465]:

Great women scientists are invisible until someone
specifically looks for great women scientists. Then they
are plentiful. But no one has to look for great male scientists.
Great male scientists always appear on lists of great scientists.
This phenomenon was illustrated with painful clarity in
this year’s recipients of the Peter and Patricia Gruber Foundation’s
awards. For the second year in a row, the awardees in cosmology, genetics, and neuroscience are all men. (p. 463)

Handelsman and Grymes discuss some of the many empirical studies demonstrating bias in the evaluation process that may relate to this disparity in awards. This includes bias in peer review (which can be greatly reduced through "blind" or deindentified review processes) and linguistic bias in recommendation letters. They conclude with four recommendations (p. 465):

All journals should use a double-blind review process.

For award nominations, if women are not represented
appropriately in the pool of candidates, the director of the competition should actively encourage universities to submit women candidates.

Selection committees should be briefed on the impact of unconscious bias.

Chairs of selection committees should ask the committee
to review its work periodically and consider whether
the process has been fair, whether all candidates were held to the same standards, and whether factors other than quality entered into their decisions.